E-Mail This Article to a Friend Agent of change The Romney administration is moving forward with a massive, untested, risky software policy throughout state government. Is this what the governor means by ‘reforming government’? BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

A CURRENT IBM commercial shows a company’s executives brainstorming cost-cutting ideas around a boardroom table, which is piled high with reports, files, and paperwork. Suddenly, one has a revelation: why don’t we stop producing "all this stuff" he says, gesturing to the table. Faces light up. Eliminate all physical documentation throughout the company? Brilliant! We’ll save millions! Send a memo! Call IBM!

Pity the employees, investors, and customers of that company, where top administrators make wholesale business-process changes on a whim, consulting no one with relevant expertise. Then again, it’s just a commercial. Business typically isn’t conducted that way in the real world. Right? Wrong. There is a place where top administrators enact change in just this way: Massachusetts state government.

Last September 26, those administrators, led by Eric Kriss, secretary of administration and finance, made Massachusetts the first state in the country to implement a technology initiative called open source. They did so without consulting state agencies, the software community, the state legislature, other states, or lawyers. Kriss just sent a memo: from now on, we adopt open-source technology.

Software-industry experts say the policy is infeasible and would cost the state hundreds of high-tech jobs. Information chiefs in other states call it potentially dangerous and costly to taxpayers in the long run. State legislators think it’s illegal.

None of these experts was consulted beforehand, but many have spoken up since. In response, on January 13 the administration released a revised version of the policy, which substantially reverses direction on open-source systems. On the other hand, some wording in the policy suggests that the original plan is still moving forward. Nobody really knows what’s going on.

And after the way the administration went about implementing the policy in the first place, nobody trusts its assertions. "Quite frankly, over the last several months with the Romney administration, very often what is in the press releases does not reflect the reality," says State Senator Marc Pacheco, who held a hearing on the open-source policy last month; Pacheco chairs the Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which reviews the state’s compliance with its own legislation and regulations.

THE NEW POLICY centers on two distinct software concepts: open standards and open source. The standards part of the policy is not particularly controversial: open standards are published protocols that enable different technology products to interact. HTML, for instance, is the common standard that lets any computer read and display Web pages.

But open source is another animal altogether. It refers to a product’s source code, or programming. Source code is the intellectual-property guts of a software product. Companies with proprietary products, like Microsoft and Oracle, do not publish their source codes. This allows them to better control licensing, modification, and their products’ continuing value.

Open-source products, on the other hand, can be copied and modified, to varying degrees, at no additional cost. Instead of paying endlessly for licenses and changes and upgrades, the state could pay once and use the product forever. Open source, in other words, is a contractual and licensing concept, not a technological one. The Linux operating system and Apache Web server, for example, are popular open-source alternatives to Microsoft products.

The push for open source is usually rooted in financial, not technological, considerations, says Gregory Jackson, chief information officer for the state of Ohio. The lure of ditching licensing fees is awfully appealing — of the $230 million in Massachusetts’s overall IT spending, $28 million goes to licensing fees, and another $38 million to software maintenance, which includes upgrades, patches, and other ongoing work.

So open source sounds great. On the surface. But no state has moved in this direction — and neither have many countries, except for a few, mostly developing nations with no money to spend on proprietary commercial products. (After extensive study in the European Union, the only open-source adopter has been a single regional government in Spain.) Even at the agency level it’s a rarity: only two percent of federal-, state-, and local-government IT managers named open-source Linux as their primary network operating system in a Government Computer News survey this fall, and a whopping 75 percent said they were "not likely at all" to consider moving to Linux.

Why? "There are not nearly enough open-source solutions out there right now to operate most of the state’s systems," says Joyce Plotkin, executive director of the Massachusetts Software Council. There are open-source alternatives to some general-purpose software, like Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet, Plotkin explains, but not many for the niche and custom-designed software that runs hundreds of unique tasks throughout state agencies, from tracking lottery scratch tickets and generating registration-renewal notices to tracking snow plowers’ Global Positioning Systems. "It’s not really practical. It makes you scratch your head about what is the real goal here."

"Were someone to have a blanket rule to buy open-source software, it would be almost impossible for the state to follow up on it," agrees Steffan Berelowitz, founder of BiT Group, a Web-application developer in Boston. His company doesn’t do any business with the state, but he says he worries "as a citizen of the Commonwealth" that an open-source preference would lead IT managers in the state to overlook top-notch proprietary software and choose among the relatively few open-source options. "If you don’t evaluate the software on the merits of the software itself, there is a danger that the state can end up making some very bad decisions."

An open-source policy would also shut out many companies from Massachusetts IT contracts, according to CompTIA, an industry organization whose 16,000 members include both open-source and proprietary venders. The many software companies in Massachusetts that currently sell their proprietary products to the state would, CompTIA argues, lose that business to free or low-cost open-source alternatives. In a report produced in December (available at www.softwarechoice.org), CompTIA estimated that the policy as originally drafted would cost the Massachusetts economy 450 jobs and $20 million in the first year, and 1100 jobs and $1.5 billion over 20 years.

Ohio’s state legislature started asking questions about open source during recent budget hearings, says Jackson, so he’s putting some limited pilot systems in place. But he’s restricting their impact, placing Apache on file and print servers, where an office might normally use $1000 "entry-level" servers from Microsoft or Sun Microsystems; if they occasionally shut down, lose some data, or get broken into, it won’t be that big a deal.

"When it gets into application areas, it becomes more problematic," Jackson says, referring to software designed to handle complicated or sensitive tasks, like processing Criminal Offender Record Information reports or calculating Medicaid benefits. The high-performance Sun ONE Application Server or Microsoft Commerce Server, for example, cost $20,000.

Open-source programs don’t have a proven track record with such operations, says Jackson. And with licensed proprietary products, the state has a contractual partner it can hold responsible to find and fix problems that can affect the security or reliability of the system. As any IT director will tell you, the only thing worse than getting all those annoying patches from Microsoft would be not getting them. "If you charge someone a perpetual license, the vender is responsible for updates, modifications, and maintenance," says Gil Rodriguez, director of public-sector sales for Metatomix, a software developer in Waltham. His company holds several contracts with the state. "If we give the state access to the source code, and they’re going to do that, it’s a big commitment on their part."

Rodriguez means that without a license tethering the software maker to the customer, the state would have to rely on its own people to keep its software systems constantly secure and glitch-free — a daunting task likely to result in all kinds of breakdowns, data errors, and hacker attacks. Moreover, the Massachusetts state government currently employs virtually nobody with the skills needed to work with open-source systems, admits Peter J. Quinn, the state’s chief information officer. That includes the current programmers in its IT departments, as well as the everyday workers at their desks, who would need to be retrained en masse to use new databases, spreadsheets, and word processors if the state flushed its Microsoft and other proprietary software. "The biggest issue is the skill impact to the workforce — the skills needed to implement and maintain open-source systems," says Rock Regan, Connecticut’s chief information officer.

In fact, makers of open-source software are increasingly making money by selling the product cheap, and charging down the line for training and programming. That’s almost certain to happen in Massachusetts. Because of this, Regan says, "I think a little of the cost savings [of open source] may be inflated."